“Well, everyone else does. And I have been punished most thoroughly for my impatience. I threw everything away in my haste and poor judgment. The chance of real love, of a husband, of children. All gone. Do you think I need you to remind me in this hurtful way? To hear it from you, whom I had hoped—but, no. Let me just say that is the unkindest cut of all.” She was about to cry in front of him yet again, so she stood. “And this idea that somehow someone could repair my honor by hurting the man who hurt me—it horrifies me.”
There was a knock on the door so she went to it, turned the knob and walked out, pushing past the butler Andrews standing in the hallway.
She must give up now.
She must surrender to her fate.
Just as she had two years ago.
How foolish she had been to hold out hope for a different outcome. How cruel life was to give her a glimpse of what she might have had and then take it away again.
She got down the hall and to the other wing and into her own bedchamber. Somehow. She did not remember the steps she took. She closed the door behind her and sank to the floor and lay there.
She had made her own bed in that cold London carriage over two years ago and now she could clearly see the years of lying in that lonely bed stretching in front of her. A lonely bed in her cottage in Dunburn. And when she rose from that bed there would be an endless parade of red-haired and green-eyed girls that she would teach but who would nevercouriein her lap as they might if they were daughters.
A life of usefulness but one devoid of that which she had been seeking from the beginning. Love. Received and given. By someone who understood her. And whom she understood.
She had hoped that he was strong enough to see her. All of her. He had made her think that he was.
But either he was too weak or she was too much of a whore. Or both.
Twenty-Seven
She was gone.
She had come to him. And he had only made the situation worse by revealing his weakness, his jealousy, his acquisitive nature. He had lost control just as he had in the drawing room when he had almost struck Morpeth. And he had made her feel ashamed of her past when he should have been the one healing that wound, not the one ripping it open again.
He had been the stupid man. Again.
The butler Andrews was standing in the door that Arabella had left open upon her exit. He coughed just a bit to get Alasdair’s attention. “The master, Lord Morpeth, is ill, Dr. Andrews. Will you come?”
Alasdair felt himself about to cry or vomit. Still, he had never refused a request for his ministrations, no matter how much anguish he himself felt. No matter how ill he had been himself when a terrible fever had swept over his ship, far out in the Atlantic. No matter how weak his bowels had been when he had been on duty during his training and dysentery had crippled the hospital in Edinburgh.
And he needed to escape himself. His wretched self. And work had always been the way to do so. Much better to be consumed by someone else’s illness than to be living in his own pain.
He followed the butler down the hallway out of this wing and to the central part of the house, to the room next to Lady Morpeth’s bedchamber.
The baron was in only a shirt and trousers, lying supine on the bed. When the butler and Alasdair came into the room, he tried to get up but he winced and had to lie back.
“I asked for no physician,” he growled.
“I did.” A sharp woman’s voice.
Alasdair then saw that Lady Lyndmouth was in the room.
“Lord Morpeth has been having some pain in his abdomen for some hours now. Perhaps since luncheon?” She turned to Morpeth, who said nothing.
Alasdair waited.
“You must help him, Doctor,” Lady Lyndmouth said.
“Yes.” Morpeth grinned, a few beads of sweat on his forehead in the cold room. “Yes, we will see, won’t we, if you really do treat everyone the same. Even those you may have a grievance against.”
“I can only help if Lord Morpeth wants me to,” Alasdair said.
“Giles,” Lady Lyndmouth said. “Giles.”
Again, Morpeth tried to sit up and winced and had to fall back.
